Collaboration typically implies a particular methodology. The Merriam-Webster, for instance, defines the word as working “with, together, or jointly.” Yet this common definition, while outlining some necessary limitations, also cannot account for the way in which collaborations might exceed normative connotations of both “work” and “togetherness.” The contributions in our first issue demonstrate that the meaning of “with, together, or jointly” is not as straightforward as it seems. In an age of financial capitalism, when demands for profit animate collaboration and imagination to maximize efficiency, minimize risk, and develop plans for the future that look eerily like the present (Keeling, 2019), aesthetic experiments can show that the processural work of collaboration is often much riskier and uncertain. Even as collaboration has become something of a touchstone in corporate discourse, we think that there’s still something reserved in collaboration that is radically open and undetermined because at its most fundamental level, it directly involves people making something. We might posit that the practice of collaboration renews what is meant by laboring together.
In the inaugural issue of col-, we asked for projects that engaged with collaboration in any way, leaving open the specific approaches, materials, genres, to consider “what does it mean to think and make together?” The response was plentiful and the pieces—including poetry, audioworks, visual art, essay, translation, correspondence, multimedia, and adaptation—throughout our journal surprised us.
In Bruce Bond and Dan Beachy-Quick’s sequence of poems “Therapon I, 1-4”, poem, poet, and matter act and react in ways that exceed expectations: “And you’re telling me that broken water rises? I am.” Excerpted from the book Therapon (Tupelo Press, December 2023), Beachy-Quick and Bond’s collaboratively written work reorients the typical directionality of agency. One line reads: “Matter teaches me to sing by singing in the emptiness. Yes, it does.” Who is the poet in such an encounter? The dialogic form of the poem only expands the possible answers to this question. In a passage that evokes the question and response form of Edmond Jabès, Bond and Beachy-Quick write: “the poem creates the distance it must cross? Yes, it does. / Makes itself a bridge above the dark hours? Yes.” Bond and Beachy-Quick test the capacity of the poem as a space for response, an experiment that, in various ways, calls to mind several other contributions in this first issue.
Blair Johnson and Luke Williams’s collaborations engage the poem as a space for response through technological play. In “Mouth against mouth, wide open,” a cacophony of whispered stanzas consume themselves in simultaneity as the rendered text further distorts through reproduction. As they are consumed further, the audiovisual component and the poem’s legibility blur into single pixel renderings and empty static. The reciprocality of consumption, of poem and of computational functionality, paradoxically creates a generative deterioration, which opens space rather than posits an intention for the collaboration. In tandem with this piece, “tongue prattle” describes speech patterns (e.g. “tongue tip blocks air”) and vocalizes them with a computer text-reader. In its staccato, robotic voice, the machine’s “reading” of this infinitely generated poem underscores breath in its absence. Their third piece, “Material Place for a Person,” prompts the viewer to “re-place” the pairing of person and place in duotone by clicking. These combinations seem inexhaustible, as permutations of color, place, and person generate randomly. These chance encounters evoke whimsy and imagination: what might a “felt room for a choreographer” entail? And when do we deem someone is “misplaced”?
In an excerpt from their collection Among Us, Kiki Vera Johnson and Arianna Nash’s poems oscillate between the two, threading the reader through their collaborative writing and revision practice. Attention to place, to distance, and to time, marks the opening of each poem. In this series, which spans 2013, the opening poems locate their authors in San Francisco, California—together—but this togetherness is elongated as the two traverse the year. The “you” invoked in each iteration becomes a refuge or location that can hold both in its ambiguity, fusing them through an openness held within this correspondence, or as “A” conceives of it, “and that’s the trouble with you / it won’t stick to just one person— / becomes everywhere, like I does sometimes.” To read these poems is to read across, to try to understand how “K” knows “when you near the water’s edge, / it will submerge you even faster / than your poems instruct,” by moving back to see where the hint of this occurs, or if the hint is an intimacy beyond the poems surface—held in the correspondence.
Correspondence proved a vital methodology for Peaches Hash and Chris McGunnigle, both scholars in composition and pedagogy, when the pandemic impacted their typical praxis. In “‘You’ve Got Snail Mail’: Artistic Inquiry and Collaboration In and Outside the Classroom,” Hash and McGunnigle reflect on their epistolary connection that they fostered during the Spring of 2021. The authors recount theories of collaboration, notably the shift to viewing collaboration as entering the conversation, and how the pandemic thrust seasoned educators into uncertain terrain. However, the narrative they provide demonstrates how vital connection, collaboration, and mutual support is within academia. McGunnigle defined their communication as “not only a matter of how we expressed ourselves but also what we were expressing.” Moveover, Hash and McGunnigle simultaneously bring rigor and honesty, method and empathy that illustrates how scholarship and the scholar both benefit from a collaborative approach. As Hash notes, “there was a great deal of joy during our collaboration, but also significant growth.” From their piece, collaboration through “snail mail” correspondence fostered not only important insight into how to approach the classroom in the pandemic, but also how instructors, scholars, and writers can support and encourage each other.
The contributions in the first issue also demonstrate that collaboration might be thematized and interrogated in single authored works. For instance, Dana Venerable’s poem “FUZZY ===a playlist poem===” was written while listening to a playlist that made her “feel fuzzy in [her] senses.” This single authored piece is “a love letter to fuzz and all things and people who are fuzzy,” and collaborates with an embodied fuzz that infuses the surrounding world and celebrates its agency to “join and escape,” to “dance.” In the notes to the piece, Venerable explains that “growing up, many people told me that I would ‘look better’ without fuzz or volume in my hair.” But she “disagreed and still [does].” For this reason, fuzz emerges as “a tactic funk halo,” “as thinking gear,” and resurfaces by teeming at the surface of life, from butterflies to stout beer. By including the accompanying playlist, Venerable opens the possibility of submersion into the atmospheric ecosystem of this poem, and after listening and rereading, we might ask, how is Venerable crafting a collaborative biosphere for all things fuzzy?
Callie Ingram’s excerpt from her longer work emergent occasions, sickness explores connectivity and causality through a remarkable erasure of Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624) by John Donne, in which Ingram’s text “emerges” from Donne’s source text as a visual recession. “Was I not sick before” the final poem asks, “did it / make me sick,” emphasizing the uncertain power of an ambiguous “it.” Maintaining Donne’s use of first person, the poems query the porousness of an “I” that is open to the world and asks what might remain of that “I” when access to the speaker’s world is suddenly barred: “I fear now; I fear / My weakness / away / from / myself civil.” To invoke the poem’s last word and the formal process of textual erasure, the “I” is on the verge of “annihilation.”
As a scholar and translator of James Joyce, Shantam Goyal offers, in “Annotations to a Translation of the First Line of Finnegans Wake into Hindustani,” his process of approaching a “difficult” and “different” text such as the Wake, described in the opening lines of his piece. At first glance, translation might seem to be a collaboration with a text or its author; however, Goyal pushes that the objective of this translation might be closer to a response to the way “the Wake… is an act upon language,” beckoning the translator not to reproduce the Wake, but rather transfigure the Wake, transfigure its sense of Dublin, into the context of another language. To exemplify this difference, Goyal walks the reader through a translation of the opening lines into Hindustani that is completely faithful to the source, but “simply does not say as much,” and loses the gestalt of the original. Looking to other translations, Goyal notes how each brings the Wake to their home city: “the city is what is retained as the center of these translations of spirit.” In the second translation of the opening lines, Goyal finds the spirit of the Wake by turning to what Hindustani illuminates within the work. His approach to translation finds, in attuning to what the novel accomplishes, a means of translation that is both a generative and creative act, while also still holding onto the Wake as the medium.
These reformulations of collaboration—as translation, as aesthetic experiment with source texts of various mediums, including text and music—raise questions about the nature of working with sources that Ryan Borochovitz, a scholar of adaptation and reproduction, deftly explores in his critical review of Adaptation Considered as a Collaborative Art: Process and Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). In it, he outlines “collaboration” as a keyword that undergirds recent work in film and theatrical criticism. Borochovitz shows how collaboration is fundamentally reframing notions of authorship in adaptation scholarship, when “adaptation” is taken to be “collaborations between the source’s original author/creator/artist and the later author/creator/artist who adapts their work.” For adaptation criticism moving forward, Borochovitz seems to suggest that future work ought to engage “both interpretations simultaneously, exploring situations of literal collaborative artistic labour while re-evaluating questions of plural authorship in relation to the transition from source to adaptation.”
With the latter sense of collaboration in mind, which redefines “plural authorship” by reformulating collaboration as an adaptation of source material, we can see better the complexities of Robert George’s visual art. “In Collaboration with the Past” opens with a strange observation: the files documented in the work, found in “a liquidation auction at a storage facility,” are authored by “a paranormal investigator” that “for all intents and purposes, does not exist outside of the extensive research that he left in storage.” The found documents, which report paranormal activity, underscore belief as an unsuspected aspect of authorship. George considers this “unknown” author as a “partner of [his]” work, which he “present[s]”—a choice of word that seems to posit the collaborator as a medium for the expression of the other person.
The question of “medium” brings to mind Blair Johnson and Jesse Nicholas Quebbeman-Turley’s sound work “the mouth of the machine, the machine in the mouth” which asks how voice contributes to meaning. Johnson and Quebbeman-Turley reformulate a Barthesian “grain” of the voice in a digital context that experiments with the speed of spoken words. The audio hurtles past the reader in this sonic tour de force, testing the limits of speech as a communicative act and moving towards an aesthetic experience of language. At the end of the piece, an “I” ruptures in repetition and reveals itself as “always double:” not solely the bearer of meaning but also expressivity; not only an “I” but also a “you.”
The wide range of contributions in our first issue refuse to coalesce around a single meaning of “collaboration,” retaining at its core an expansiveness. The journal’s name, as a prefix, harkens to the very opening we called out for and saw in response—the hyphen preparing the field filled by our contributors. Always retaining the modular possibility for inventive, redundant, illuminating, quiet, even frustrating ways of being “with, together, and jointly,” the hyphen remains.
— Brooke Bastie and Claire Tranchino
Bibliography
Keeling, Kara. Queer Times, Black Futures. New York University Press, 2019.
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